Continuum
by Stephen Greenwood
Summary: A series of independent vignettes with Fox Mulder at their core.


**CONTINUUM  
by Stephen Greenwood**

**Rating:** PG-13  
**Spoilers:** All nine seasons and IWTB.  
**Word count:** 4,834  
**Disclaimer:** Characters belong to Chris Carter. Lyrics belong to John Mayer. At least I have the ideas.

Written for scullyseviltwin's song writing ficathon at LiveJournal. Despite that, **this is not songfic**. Inspired by songs, yes. Centred around them, no. What follows is a series of independent vignettes with Fox Mulder at their core and John Mayer serving as background music. Some follow canon; some are AU. No slash, but some pairings other than Mulder/Scully.

With thanks to Beth.

* * *

1. **waiting on the world to change**

_Now we see everything that's going wrong  
With the world and those who lead it  
We just feel like we don't have the means  
To rise above and beat it_

_And when you trust your television  
What you get is what you got  
'cause when they own the information  
Oh, they can bend it all they want_

_It's not that we don't care  
We just know that the fight ain't fair_

They've been on the run for two years, eight months, and three days before Mulder puts his foot down and says, "I've had enough."

It's a Wednesday and they're holing up in an internet café while it rains, buying cups of coffee to have a legitimate excuse to use the computers. They're both tired and cranky, achy from sleeping in the car and in need of showers and a change of clothes. Neither is warmed by Christmas cheer.

In the café, anorexic tinsel hangs limply around a plastic tree, discoloured with age, and strings of lights with most bulbs burnt out dangle around the doorframe, the windowpanes, the countertop. It's dark even though it's only mid-afternoon. The sky remains heavy with angry clouds and streaks of water hammer at the glass. The café has become a refuge for many and the cash register chimes every couple of minutes. Porcelain mugs clink against each other and the air is alive with conversation and the aroma of coffee beans and cooked bacon.

Scully glances up from her perusal of a local newspaper and says, "Had enough of what?"

"Of this. Of everything. Here, take a look."

He gestures at the monitor with emphatic disgust and glares until she has no choice but to get up and peer at the screen. He's on a news website. The headline states, 'Two FBI Agents Killed in Freak Accident.'

"George," she sighs affectionately, "what is this?"

"It's lies. All of it, one big cover-up."

"It says here they were crushed by falling rocks in the mountains. An avalanche. Can't a freak accident be just that?"

"Not when it's happened three times in five months."

He brings up more pages, more stories about Federal Agents killed or assumed dead or missing, all down to wrong-place-wrong-time; a fire, a car crash, a bust gone bad. Not once is murder referred to, although she knows that is what Mulder is implying. He always was able to find patterns in chaos.

"Coincidence?" she tries.

He shakes his head. "They're taking out anyone who's considered a threat. Soon it'll be unsuspecting military men and uncompromising world leaders. Those who won't give up will be the first to go."

"What can we do?"

"Nothing," he says simply. "We've tried. Nobody will listen. We've got seven years; let's make the most of it. Let's buy a house or a boat, gorge ourselves on food, and drink to try and forget. We can listen to Bach and Hendrix, read classic literature, watch Bogart and Brando and Belushi. We can't save the world, Scully, but maybe we can save ourselves."

She wants to berate him for saying her name, the one he isn't allowed to call her anymore, but the weariness and defeat in his eyes makes her hold her tongue.

"Okay," she says slowly. "Okay, Mulder, we'll stop running."

_Even if it's just for Christmas_.

2. **i don't trust myself (with loving you)**

_If my past is any sign of your future  
You should be warned before I let you inside_

His new partner intrigues him. She's five feet three inches of science and rulebooks, as straight as an arrow and as sharp as a knife-edge, but she is no cliché. Dana Scully mingles reason with religion, gives as good as she gets, and deserves a lot better than the X-Files.

This is a woman who rewrote Einstein. She has a degree in physics and a better average at the shooting range than he does, and a mother and father and sister and brothers. She goes out on dates with men and gossips with girlfriends. She writes articles for JAMA and follows him to Oregon because she was ordered to.

Dana Scully cut into a mutilated corpse because Fox Mulder asked her to.

She's young and naïve. She knows nothing of exceptions to the rules, of cases negating the laws of time and space, and she's too straight-laced to think outside the box. But she's a fighter, she's tolerated him thus far, and while he argued with clocks and spray paint, she threw scientific logic in his face and refused to back down.

Now she's lying on his bed in a nondescript Bellefleur motel room, still reeling from the shock and relief of mosquito bites. Her second day on the X-Files and already she's seen so much, understood so little. But she's still here, and he thinks she ought to know what she's getting herself into if she decides to stick around.

He rests his head against the mattress and begins, "I was twelve when it happened."

3. **belief**

_We're never gonna win the world  
We're never gonna stop the war  
We're never gonna beat this  
If belief is what we're fighting for_

He's grown well accustomed to the looks people shoot his way when he tells them he believes in the existence of extra-terrestrials. He has no qualms about admitting it but it makes Scully uncomfortable, the way he always leads with it like it's his tagline or his job title: Fox Mulder, Believer. She smiles indulgently and listens to his stories and follows him into the night to look for lights in the sky, but she doesn't believe, at least not with the same conviction and intensity that he does.

And that's what he's been fighting for: belief. For open-minded people to give him a chance, to look at the evidence and for a switch to be flicked, for them to think, 'Maybe he's right.' It takes Scully to point out that instead of trying to force news of the impending invasion on others, perhaps they could try another tack.

"I'm just saying, Mulder, that they don't want to be told what to think, what to feel. These publications, the conventions… you're going round preaching like a Bible salesman, and shoving your beliefs down people's throats clearly isn't working."

"What do you suggest instead?" he asks sharply. "That I just give up? That I sit back and let whatever's going to happen take place and then wave my placard saying 'I told you so?'"

"It's a virus, right? One we've both been subjected to. And, in case you forget, I am a doctor. I can study it, I can learn what it does and how long it takes to do it, and I can create a vaccine. There is one inside me, Mulder. The blueprints are there. If I can replicate it, if we could take it to the right people, we could immunise the population without them ever really knowing what it's for."

"And if it's not what we're expecting?" he asks wearily. "If it's not a virus but full-blown warfare?"

"Then people will believe their own eyes when the battle begins. And you can say you were right while leading the front line," she replies calmly, "and I'll be right beside you."

4. **gravity**

Gravity is working against me And gravity wants to bring me down

He'd always loved flying. It wasn't the action so much as the idea behind it, the belief that man could lift off and cut through the air, could lose himself in the clouds for a while. Earth wasn't strong enough to hold a fellow down; human beings could pull free of its hold, could become untethered and free, and that's what he liked about it.

He watched the shuttle launches with the same concentration usually reserved for new episodes of 'Star Trek'. The week after Colonel Belt's space walk, he salvaged cardboard boxes and rolls of tin foil, designed and produced his own spaceship with a fuel supply made from an old, almost empty gas container he'd found in the garage. The ship never left the yard.

Then he had a telescope and flights to England and stargazing on a blanket with a girl who thought it was romantic. And then there was regressional hypnosis, the results of which almost led to a permanent crick in his neck, and more than ever he wanted to soar.

Gravity was bringing him down, was keeping him away from his sister, from the truth, was holding him to a world that held only lies. The thought of drifting away grew once the seed had been planted, became almost overwhelming after the death of his father, at the worst times of Scully's cancer, when his mother committed suicide. When he was all alone and felt like the weight of the world was on his shoulders, like Atlas.

Space was his escape, the place he ran to in his mind when everything on Earth was crumbling around him. So many stars, so many galaxies, so many planets just waiting to be discovered. And who knew what else was out there? His fertile imagination nursed the possibilities; his sense of reality reminded him he already knew, in a way.

He discovered what happened to his sister. He became his partner's lover. He was happy. He stopped looking to the stars so they looked for him, and found him in a forest in Oregon.

Ironic, that he'd dreamed of space all his life, and now he was there he wanted nothing more than to go home.

5. **the heart of life**

_You know it's nothing new  
Bad news never had good timing  
Then the circle of your friends  
Will defend the silver lining_

Pain throws your heart to the ground  
Love turns the whole thing around  
No, it won't all go the way it should  
But I know the heart of life is good

She is in pain most of the time now. A month ago she still had more good days than bad ones but recently the tumour has been keeping them at bay, standing sentry against codeine and then oxycodone. He tries to make her laugh because he remembers her once saying something about endorphins acting as natural painkillers, but even his attempts at humour fall flat where once they would have soared, and they both loathe how this disease has come to change and define her.

He still visits her every day, starts bringing flowers without excuses, packs of playing cards and a chessboard in case she feels up to a game. Sometimes they'll sit in comfortable silences for hours, pondering next moves and potential checkmates. Other times, more often now, he'll dim the lights and sit by her bedside as she squeezes his fingers and her eyes against the pain, eventually falling into an uneasy sleep.

Despite his presence, the tumour continues to grow, and therefore so does the ache between her eyes. Chess becomes almost impossible. Instead, he reads to her in hushed tones from books he picked up from her apartment and others he went out and bought because he thought she might like them. He fetches CDs and throws and pajamas. In small increments, he brings home to her because she cannot go to it.

It's difficult to focus on the positives, even for an eternal optimist like him. She's still breathing, still able to communicate, still remembers his name. But she struggles to remain conscious for long, can't walk the few feet from her bed to the door unaided, finds it hard to keep going through yet another battery of tests. The white of the walls aggravates, keeps the headache pulsing, and sitting to look out of the window is barely worth the effort.

But then Mulder arrives, jacket flung over his arm, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, tie askew, and she discovers she can spare a smile for him. He flops down into the chair at the side of the bed and, after asking how she is, begins a story about his encounters with fellow bureaucrats.

She isn't paying much attention to his words but to his expressions, the tone of his voice, the look in his eyes. He's a good man, the best of men, and _this_, she thinks, _is what I'm living for._

6. **vultures**

_Wheels up  
I got to leave this evening  
Can't seem to shake these vultures off of my trail  
Power is made by power being taken  
So I keep on running  
To protect my situation_

Things have changed since his sister's disappearance. Not just that she's gone and there's a huge fucking Samantha-shaped hole in his life, but in other ways, too. His mother sleeps a lot and his father spends most of his time behind closed doors. Friends don't stop by the house anymore. People are uncomfortable around him, treat him like they would a sick relative in the hospital. Nobody knows what to say, how to act, and there doesn't seem to be a happy medium: it's either eyes down as he passes in the hallway or guys getting in his face, taunting and mocking and provoking.

Life goes on like that for six years.

Tonight, it ends. His suitcase is packed, passport in his hand because this is his ticket out of here and he can't afford to lose it, so it stays with him at all times. He's determined to leave the Vineyard today; Oxford's calling, and the appeal of a good education is strong, but his delight at the institution being thousands of miles away from home is stronger. This isn't home. Hasn't been home since he was twelve years old, playing board games on the floor in front of the TV with his sister.

He checks his watch, wills time to go faster. The cab should be here any minute and he reluctantly leaves his perch by the doorway, knowing he can't put this off any longer.

The door to his mother's room is closed and, when he pushes it open a crack, he finds the drapes are, too. It's so dark he can barely make out her form on the bed but he manages to kneel beside her without tripping over anything.

"Mom?" he says softly. The only movement is the slow rise and fall of her chest from the pill-induced sleep. "Mom, I'm leaving," he whispers, half-hoping she'll wake, half dreading it if she did. She doesn't. "I gotta go. I might be back for Christmas, I dunno yet, so, um… take care." He waits for a reaction, finds none, and drops a soft kiss to her forehead.

He turns back when he reaches the doorway and says, "I love you, mom," even though she doesn't hear.

His father is ensconced in his study and Mulder hesitates before rapping his knuckles against the door, opening it and poking his head through. The room reeks of smoke and guilt. His father is at his desk, shouting down the phone, and he pauses long enough to cover the mouthpiece and say, "Not now, Fox. I'm busy," before returning to the argument.

Mulder shuts the door quietly and rests his forehead against the casing. He's hard-pressed to remember a more meaningful conversation with his father in recent years. He finds it fitting that it should end this way.

Outside, the cab driver sounds the horn impatiently. Oxford's calling.

7. **stop this train**

_Stop this train  
I want to get off and go home again  
I can't take the speed it's moving in  
I know I can't but, honestly, won't someone stop this train_

She tells him she's pregnant on a blistery day in March. There is no preamble, no 'I've got something to tell you,' just two words that spill out of her mouth as soon as he shuts the door. Outside, the wind howls and cackles, and for a brief moment he thinks a tornado must have taken him away from Kansas and dumped him in his worst nightmare. In that case, he figures, he must be the Cowardly Lion, because he wants nothing more than to run away.

She can't be pregnant. He can't be a father. He's too young and naïve – although he professes to know the way of the world he knows little about the ways of women – and now… now it's all he can do not to panic. He looks like a startled hedgehog, wide-eyed and flustered, by both the elements on his walk back to the apartment and her revelation upon arriving, and curling into a tight ball on the floor has an allure to it he doesn't want to ignore.

But he has to. This is the kind of thing that separates the men from the boys, turns the latter into the former, and Mulder has never had a shaky moral compass. She knows that. She also knows she can talk him into doing anything as long as she pouts and smiles and promises to reward him handsomely later. For a split second he wonders if this baby was born out of bribery, and then decides that's not a good path to travel down; best to stop before he reaches the fork in the road of illegitimacy. The kicker is that he was going to end things as soon as he could find the right words.

He decides he must have been a real bastard in a previous life.

This is atonement. So instead of collapsing or turning tail, he smiles. It's shaky but it's a smile, and she either ignores the fear radiating off him in waves or just plain doesn't notice as she takes his hand and leads him to the bedroom. This could have been where it happened and he pushes aside the twinge of regret. What's done is done. Bed's been made, Fate says, now lie in it.

Besides, he reasons as he takes her in his arms and lowers his lips to hers, pretending that what he feels for her is love, it could just have easily been the couch. Or the car. Or Conan Doyle's tombstone.

8. **slow dancing in a burning room**

_It's not a silly little moment  
It's not the storm before the calm  
This is the deep and dying breath of  
This love that we've been working on_

In the end, it doesn't take much to break them apart.

It dies with screaming and shouting and formerly concealed, harshly revealed regrets. After knowing each other so long, both know exactly where to push, when and how hard, and the result is an anger that rivals only their old passion in its intensity. She holds the upper hand: she can leave the house without looking over her shoulder, can hear police sirens without believing they're for her.

He's still an outlaw and she's all he's got; all he used to have, really, because she's been drifting away for a while now and he's been too absorbed in newspaper clippings to notice the sinking ship. She has a life outside of these four walls. He isn't allowed one.

It's his apparent lack of interest and her newfound freedom that drives a stake through it. She's working a lot of extra hours at the hospital; is she seeing someone else? He practically lives at the computer; just what has he been posting on those internet forums?

They both discover that trust takes years to earn and mere minutes to shatter. When she packs her bags, it is with a finality that should hurt but doesn't. He seethes from the doorway, eventually stalking to the kitchen and grabbing a beer from the fridge; in his anger, alcohol seems like the best solution.

She lugs her suitcase from the bedroom and heads for the door, shooting daggers as she goes. She looks like she wants to say something – fire a parting shot, maybe – but just can't find the words. He meanders over to the couch and picks up a magazine from the coffee table, feigning disinterest.

"Don't tell anyone where I am," he says gruffly, without looking up from the journal. "You owe me that much."

She pauses and stares at him. "I owe you nothing," she says, and leaves.

9. **bold as love**

_All these emotions of mine keep holding me from _  
_Giving my life to a rainbow like you_

What does he know about being a father? He certainly doesn't have kids – never gave much thought to ever even wanting any – and there are no nieces or nephews to look after. No friends with children, either. He literally has nothing to go on, and he thinks he ought to know better than to attempt to build on the remnants of a broken home.

Yet he's considering doing it anyway.

Of all the men in the world, she chose him. Dana Scully chose Fox Mulder over a guy with a smaller nose and the ability to distinguish between red and green, without a martyr complex and a stubborn need to know the truth. She could have picked an anonymous donor but she didn't, and that has to mean something. She must think him capable, even desirable, at least in terms of genetic material. But he doesn't know the big picture: will his contribution end once he's jerked off into a plastic cup or will he be taking his kid to school and Little League games, helping with toilet training and homework and driving lessons?

Mulder has never been afraid of the unknown but this terrifies him. This has the potential to change everything. His relationship with Scully would never be the same again and if there's one thing he knows amid this storm of uncertainty, it's that he can't risk losing her. He needs her scientific logic and the quirk of her eyebrow, the daily challenge and camaraderie, the challenge and the joy that comes with being her partner and her friend. Joy he could help bring to her by agreeing to her request.

This is everything to her and she is everything to him, so when he stops thinking he finds the decision is already made. He grabs his jacket and heads for her apartment before his mind convinces him that this is a leap of faith too far. Some things are worth taking a chance on.

10. **dreaming with a broken heart**

_When you're dreaming with a broken heart  
__Then waking up is the hardest part  
__You roll outta bed and down on your knees_  
_And for a moment you can hardly breathe  
__Wondering was she really here?  
__Is she standing in my room?  
__No she's not, 'cause she's gone, gone, gone, gone, gone_

It's hot in New Mexico and although the desert cools at night, the inside of the trailer doesn't. The metal box retains heat, keeps the air humid and stale and uncomfortable; he feels like he's suffocating, one breath at a time. The air-conditioning unit splutters and spits out a chilled breeze in fits and starts but never for long enough, rarely at times when the temperature is caressing a hundred and four and he's standing in front of the open refrigerator in his boxer shorts, still sweating and convinced his skin will melt clean off his bones if he has to tolerate another minute of this.

But there's nothing else he can do. He's a fugitive now; he can't venture outside yet, isn't willing to risk it, and the TV fights valiantly to pick up a signal, only occasionally emerging the victor. He's flicked through Gibson's magazines, read Stephen King novels that he could relate too much to for them to be scary, and filled in so many crossword puzzles out of boredom he saw black and white squares for days. So that leaves sleep, and even that doesn't come easily. The oppressive heat makes him drowsy but his mind remains alert and won't let him drift off until he's been lying there for hours.

When he does sleep, he sees her in his dreams.

They're so real that he sometimes thinks them fevered delusions, sometimes goes one step further and believes she is right here, crawling into bed beside him, taking him in her arms and into her body. She tells him she misses him and that he should come home; he tells her that he wants to, needs to, because this is Hell in a pitiful disguise, and he's been on the lookout for his first glimpse of a pitchfork.

In his dreams, she doesn't grow solemn and remind him that they've seen the Devil in a thousand costumes already, masquerading as businessmen, as housewives, as government officials. In his dreams, she smiles instead and kisses him in lieu of telling him to shut up, and he gets to hold her through the night and she's there in the morning.

When he wakes, the scent of her doesn't linger on the pillow. His arms are empty and her side of the bed is cold.

11. **in repair**

_I'm in repair_  
_I'm not together but I'm getting there_

He thinks it's all one big mistake, one of those clerical errors that happen from time to time because humans aren't infallible. It's a typo; someone checked the wrong box and that's what it can be traced back to, a blip on the records and a black mark against her name, right where it shouldn't be.

The drugs worked like they were supposed to. The chemo is a distant dream now she's much better. She's in remission and the prognosis is good. He didn't pick out a headstone and give a eulogy and watch her body being returned to the earth; ashes to ashes, dust to dust, just like the priest said. Nobody cried because there wasn't a funeral and he doesn't spend his days trying to forget because there's nothing to remember.

He doesn't fight back tears when anybody mentions her name in conversations he isn't supposed to hear. Nobody looks at him with pity in their gaze when he drags himself to work for yet another day, clothes rumpled and face unshaven and eyes red. He doesn't find one of her sweaters in the laundry basket and he doesn't pull it out and place it carefully in her drawer – _her_ drawer – because she'll be coming over again and she might want to wear it.

She's lost her cell phone. That's all it is, and her internet connection has been bust for months. She's on medical leave from the Bureau and she's using the time to go travelling, and that's why nobody's been able to get in touch with her. That's all it is. When she comes back they'll laugh and talk and swap stories, and he'll go back to life and get some work done instead of floundering in a limbo where he can't stand the sight of himself.

Her mother doesn't call to talk about her and her voice doesn't break when she says her daughter's name. Her older brother still hates him. He doesn't meet the younger one and he doesn't solemnly shake his hand and he doesn't use his shoulder to cry on.

He doesn't get drunk that night and wake up completely lost the following morning. He doesn't repeat this process for a week until his supervisor tells him to get over it, she's gone and he's still here and life sucks, everybody knows it but some are better at hiding it than others.

There's no need for him to be swallowed by the blackness, to think of ways he could destroy himself. He hasn't put his gun to his mouth every night for two weeks, and he hasn't pulled the trigger because she's still here.

When he calls her number he hears her voice but she doesn't return his calls.

12.** i'm gonna find another you**

_So go on, baby  
Make your little get away  
My pride will keep me company  
And you just gave yours all away_

Europe.

That's where she's going. Where she's running to. And he's powerless to stop her. Isn't sure he wants to.

He watches her take her sweaters, her time, and with every balled-up pair of socks and folded t-shirt she tosses into the suitcase he finds his rhyme and reason curling up alongside them.

He doesn't tell her that. Doesn't tell her not to go. Certainly doesn't beg and plead, even though his heart wants him to and that's usually what fuels him, but he could have sworn it was broken because it hurts in his chest and he doesn't trust it and he can't seem to do anything, say anything, to prevent her from leaving.

He can't move from the doorway, even as she passes, case in one hand, his rejected love, their discarded life, in the other. She can't look him in the eye and he thinks that alone speaks volumes.

"I'll call," she says.

"No, you won't," he replies, and hears her leave.


End file.
